Bloodthirsty - By Flynn Meaney Page 0,14
to bats, plotting to lure women down there. I have a brother and a family and a life! Okay, so I still have to plot to lure women. But I don’t drink their blood!
Suddenly, the frustration of a week of accumulated insults caught up with me big time. I hated this blond stranger, hated her with a passion. I hated her blond hair. I hated her dumb creepy book. I hated the assumptions she made about other people based on their unusual medical conditions and their pale skin. I hated her dumb shoes and her dumb clothes. I hated her stupid necklace that said “best friends” on it and was shaped like half a heart. I hated whomever had the other half, because they were a dumbass for being this girl’s friend.
“You know what?” I stormed at her, standing up violently (then falling into the seat in front of me because the train lurched. But I maintained my anger throughout). “If I’m so creepy, if I’m so scary, if I’m a vampire,” I said pretty loudly, “then why did you sit next to me?”
“No,” the girl interrupted. “You don’t understand….”
“I do understand,” I said. I squeezed past her, getting awkwardly stuck on her knees, but shoving my way through. Then I stood in the aisle of the train.
“I understand that you’re obnoxious,” I told her. “And that you could have sat next to that possibly homeless man.”
The possibly homeless man across the aisle looked up at me.
“Or that guy who’s awkwardly checking out that girl’s boobs,” I continued.
That guy, sitting in the third seat of the train car, quickly looked back to his New York Times, which was upside down. That girl, across the aisle from him, buttoned her jacket.
“But you didn’t!” I told Blondie. “You sat next to me.”
“You don’t understand,” the blond girl pleaded. “I really like vamp—”
“I’m leaving!” I told her. “This is my stop!”
I stood there, holding on to the pole, trying to not look back at the blond girl. Or at that guy who I’d called out for looking down that girl’s shirt. Or at that businessman who was pissed that I wasn’t blind—no way was I giving back those two dollars. And then I realized that storming out of the train was becoming kind of anticlimactic because there were about three minutes of agonizing silence left before the train finally stopped and the doors opened at Fordham.
chapter 4
I think my twin brother, Luke, is a superhero. He can sprint like a cheetah. He can do the hundred-yard dash in ten seconds. He can catch something, throw something, and swat at a fly all at the same time. He can do no-look passes to the shooting guards on the basketball court. Actually, he can pass to himself on the basketball court. He has the reflexes of a Marvel comic character and the speed of a hermaphrodite Olympian.
Our pediatrician thinks Luke has a hyperactivity disorder. Luke can’t read more than one chapter of a book at a time. He can’t finish standardized tests. He walked out on the PSAT last year and went to see an action movie instead. Then he walked out on the movie. Luke can’t eat dinner without standing up and running around the table. He doesn’t do great in school, and he makes some people impatient. During our childhood, three elementary school teachers, a zookeeper, and a museum guide at the World’s Largest Ball of Paint all quit their jobs and not by coincidence. (My mother was sad when that zookeeper left the children’s zoo. He was gonna give her advice he’d learned from raising baby baboons.)
In eighth grade, increasingly concerned about Luke’s bad grades, my parents put Luke on a drug for ADHD. Three months into taking it, Luke collapsed midcourt during a CYO basketball game. I’ve never seen so many rosaries pulled out of so many purses so fast.
An ambulance rushed him to the hospital. The medicine had sped up his heartbeat, and there was so much blood rushing around his body that he got dizzy and passed out.
My mother has been neurotic about our health since she was knocking on her stomach and yelling “Are you dead in there?” at our nine-week-old fetal selves. So you can guess how much she freaked out about Luke and the ambulance. She never let him take that ADHD medicine again. In fact, she never let him take a Flintstones vitamin.
So how did she react when the weaker of her offspring arrived at